Mild Thing: 'Not a Lot of Enrollments' in First Two Days of Exchanges

The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff has a new story titled “Government continues bid to streamline new health exchanges.” Predictably, this is a story about the failure of the exchanges and how, after two days, people are finally able to use the sites.

“Most of day one and two we didn’t see enrollments,” Cigna spokesman Joe
Mondy said. “But we’ve been able to start getting enrollments as of
last night.”

[…]

“My understanding is there’s not a heck of a lot of enrollments across
the industry, which is reasonable” he said. “Folks are looking at plans.
We don’t expect enrollments to go from a trickle to a wave until
November. The bottom line for us is that the system is working. It’s
very encouraging.”

So the crush of traffic is not a crush of enrollments, it’s a crush of window shoppers. Someone should tell fellow Wonkblogger Erza Klein who just yesterday was pointing to the claim of 10 million visits as proof the exchanges are a hit.

If anything my estimate of the number of sign ups nationwide (2.5% of those who visited the federal site) may have been overly optimistic.